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Automatically logoff users who have restricted hours

by
Wayne Maples
[Published on 20 April 2004 / Last Updated on 20 April 2004]

You have contractors or part-time personnel whose logons must be restricted to
hours during which they can be supervised. You use the Hours option in User Manager for
Domains to restrict the accounts to 8:00am - 5:00pm. This is a common
mistake made by administrators. The Hours option sets
the hours for when NT will validate the users account and allow a login.
Unfortunately this setting does nothing to prevent the user from staying logged
on for however long they wish. They could logon Monday morning and stay logged
on until Friday. This setting does not force a logoff at 5:00pm.

To force such a logoff, select the Account Policies
menu in User Manager for Domains and set the
Forcibly disconnect remote user from server when logon hours
expire check box.

This works to break a connection to a server but if you actually want to
force a logoff of workstations at a certain time, you can use the freeware Poweroff
which is a small program for Win95/98/NT/W2K to schedule a
shutdown/reboot/logoff/poweroff at a certain time. It also supports command line
options that allows poweroff to be used in batch scripts.

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